Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Profession Dependency

My main, Coriel, is an enchanter. One of the new changes to enchanting in Wrath is that enchanters can create scrolls of specific enchants and sell the scrolls on the Auction House, rather than having to troll Trade chat if you want to sell enchants.

I tried out the new system the other day, grabbing an Armor Vellum off the AH and making a Scroll of Enchant Cloak - Greater Speed. I put it up for sale at pretty much material cost. To my surprise, the scroll sold. This is great for me because I'm only at 430 enchanting or so, and if I can get the skill points by selling scrolls, that's much easier.

So I went back to the AH. But there were zero Armor Vellum up for sale. Armor Vellum is made by Inscriptionists, and a necessary component for every enchanting scroll you want to make. Now I have to track down an inscriptionist and come to some agreement. This is pretty much the exact process I was hoping to avoid with regular Enchanting.

I really don't like professions to be dependent on each other in this fashion. I much prefer the model where a character can take the crafter/gatherer combo and be self-sufficient for the most part. I don't mind one-off recipes where you have to get an item from another crafter. For example, an enchanter needs a rod from blacksmithing every so often. But to need an item from another profession for every single enchanting scroll made is excessive.

I think Armor and Weapon Vellums should have been craftable by enchanters. Giving that essential component over to Inscription, making the two professions tightly coupled, is just frustrating.

work a deal out with a friend or guildy to get the vellum things you need.

Since your 430 skill, i'd say go ahead and buy a 20 stack to get you going for awhile. Once you start getting low buy another 10 or so.

Not only will this save you alot of money(by not having to go to the ah every so often and being exposed to whatever the price is for the day, let alone pray its not a weekend) it will save you time to boot.

P.S. not sure about your server, but inscriptionists basically cant keep up with the damand of nobles cards on my server. Considering that the faire will be in shat in 5 days, its only going to get worse. The cards sell for a min of 700g with the ace fetching 1200g min.

You don't have to make the scrolls, though. You can completly ignore them and just sell enchants the old fashioned way.

I actually kinda wish there was -more- interdependency. Maybe not to the level where everything you need is made by another profession, but if a good percentage of combines required something that another profession made, that would give the other professions something they could rely on for making money.

Try being a tailor, all the recipes I can make now (at around 420ish skill level) require Imbued Frostweave, to make an Imbued Frostweave I need 2 Infinite Dust and 2 bolts of Frostweave (down from the 3 it was before the patch). That means that every skill up takes around 6 or more dust and Frostweave bags, my preferred leveling product, take 6 Imbued Bolts which means I need 60 cloth and 12 dust per bag. This is why I am glad I paired Tailoring with Enchanting but man it sucks sometimes to be that dependent on dust.

I haven't had an enchanter since pre-BC specifically because I hated having to waste so many enchants on my own gear over and over again at low levels or sit there spamming Trade to give them out for free, and being an altoholic, it was one profession that didn't benefit any of my characters but that one, except for mana oils.

Of course now that my main is a scribe, I'm finding leveling enchanting on my alt is much less painful. I'm making +3 stamina scrolls by the dozens, and mailing them off to my other lowbie alts to enchant their gear as they level up.

Heh, Kiryn, I actually debated over using Scribe vs Inscriptionist. Inscriptionist makes the link to the WoW profession obvious. Scribe is technically correct, but people might not make the connection to the profession immediately.

I did a google search, and both of the terms seem to be in use. Such is the glory of English, that it has such great flexibility.

Proffesion dependency seems reasonable in order to formulate a correct `market'. Sometimes when one needs something from another crafter and can not find it will think thats a drag. Other times he will be the one selling something and thinking its an oportunity.

At the end of the day what seems to be the issue is the level of depedency between some proffesions. As far as that is concerned not all proffessions have the same degree of dependecy which in the grand scheme if things seems `unfair' but its difficult to fix. The latter probably apeares because proffessions are not always well designed. The issue of balancing proffessions around classes and the augmentation of skills they offer often conflicts with their design. And that affects subsequently dependency.

This is one of the reasons I have Altism. I want to be self sufficient. So I have worked it out so that all my Alts that I focus primarily on, have seperate professions but are still somewhat useful in their own right. Only thing I am lacking is skinning/leatherworking and Blacksmithing. Leatherworking only because it's on my Druid which I plan on working on soon. And Blacksmithing because of how much of a pain it is to skill up.

Part of the problem is that Vellums don't sell for a very good price. They are very cheap to make (they require only low level mats), but an Inscriber can use those same mats to make high-priced low-level minor glyphs. Why sell a couple of Armor Vellums for a few silver when you can get 10g for the same mats by selling a Glyph of Mend Pet?

My solution to this is just to have two max-level characters, one with enchanting and one with inscription.

Obviously that's not an optimal solution, and doesn't work for everyone.

But you did give me the idea of putting up Vellums for a reasonable profit when I get home tonight.

Anyway, this is pretty much the one case where I'm OK with the dependency (I usually HATE anything that makes me unable to be self sufficient, see alts with every profession), because it gives Scribes something of value to sell. IT would be a different story if vellums were somehow *required* by enchanters, but they are just a nice bonus. Most enchanters knew what they were getting into when they picked the profession: you do your enchants in face to face encounters, and if you want to make money you spam trade chat.

It seems like the problem in your story isn't necessarily the interdependence of 2 tradeskills itself, but the fact that no vellums were available on the AH. If the Scribes were actually supplying them, you wouldn't have had a problem.

I forgot to add: if the price of vellums would be too low to be a good choice for profit for the scribe, then yeah, we have a problem. But that could be fixed by patching vellums to be cheaper to make: lower the mat cost AND have each attempt create more multiple vellums. Then I can make as much profit selling a stack of vellums as I can selling a single minor glyph. :P

It may be just a temporary blip due to darkmoon cards of the north. With Nobles decks going for 10kg (down from 15) there is a lot of inscription focus on DM cards. E.g. Ink of the Sea went from 25g/stack to > 80 after 3.0.8

My guess is that soon scribes will be back to turning 4g of ink into 9g glyphs and you will find more vellums available. But there are a lot of scribes and just get one to make u a one time purchase to make enough vellum to get you to 450 enchanting.

Meh, it seems to me the main people making money from inscription are herbalists.

I don't see the problem. besides the rods just how many other professions do you have to count on? at all? enchanting is it's own gathering skill. I think that may have kinda spoiled the enchanters, Kill monsters, run instances= get stuff to DE into your mats. look at engineering or blacksmiths. they need mining or they are kinda boned (not to mention that the high end engineering specs need leather too) or scribes: herbalism. leather workers and skinning. the only ones that didn't need much if any outside help were enchanting and tailoring. the special cloth gave tailors a need for the gathering profession (enchanting) and now you have enchanters who need scribes to make something, but not something they need to level. sorry i have no sympathy

I think Shopshopshop has nailed the reasoning from Blizzard's part on this issue: Scribes need something to sell that will still be in demand all the way to the next expansion. Since glyphs might not need changing that much (especially if dual builds support dual glyph sets), letting scribes supply mats to enchanters gives another thing to sell. And enchanters finally got the scrolls option from the deal, thus making them more happy than angry.

Odd thing about it is that I posted a crap load of mats into the guild bank to go for free to whomever would become a scribe and thereafter create vellums on retainer - i.e. we'd pay them AH prices for a stack, covering their leveling costs with mats the whole way.

Actually Inscription is quite self sufficient. You merely need to figure out how to make a profit off of selling your glyphs or darkmoon cards. Then you buy herbs when they are low and sell high. You siphon the profit into your own vellum or grow your business. Jewelcrafting is the same way. If you are smart about it you never need herb a node.

Enchanting before inscription was like a combo profession. You can gather by turning loot into dusts/shards and then craft something which is a enchant. They even have transmutes and oils and miscellaneos things like enchanted leathers they could craft to sell. Adding the ability to put enchants on the AH obviously was to make the process simpler for a casual player to get "glowy" weapons, which helps subscription numbers. It was apparent the lack of thought regarding many of the professions from the start.

Interdependence is the beauty of this game, and the reason online games are so immersive. I've been primarily a solo-player, but if you can't at LEAST appreciate the inter-dependence of professions, why would you play a MMORPG??

You cant really be self sufficient without multiple characters. My preferrence is Tailoring/enchanting, blacksmith/jewelcrafting, leatherworking/alchemy, Mining skinning, and Herb/inscription. The reason? You only have to gather with 2 characters and all the major crafting professions are covered, level those and you are almost completely self sufficient and you can gather pretty much at your leisure.

That is just my personal solution, for you I might go Ench/inscrip then have a guy with Mining/herbalism (yes, only one or the other shows up on radar, but usually mining nodes are fairly obvious)